They keep inventing them, don’t they?
New expressions we didn’t have before, and I’m not entirely persuaded we need now!
This one, ‘keystone species’ appears to have been coined in 1969.
It was coined in the ecological community and first appeared in a journal called American Naturalist in 1969.
It means ‘a species exerting a major influence on an ecosystem, especially one on whose activities the survival of other species depends’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
Of course, various species have been going extinct since the dawn of time.
That’s why you won’t bump in a stray dinosaur in your supermarket parking lot.
This just seems to be part of the pattern of life on earth.
But according to at least some ecologists—this should stop!
And stop now!
No more species going extinct!
Well, good luck with that, since the pattern seems to be rather deeply embedded in nature of this planet.
And as part of their ‘non-extinction’ program they identify these ‘keystone species’ which are important because other species depend on them.
Hence, if a ‘keystone species’ happens to go extinct, so will all the others that depend on them.
I suspect that a lot of ‘keystone species’ are prey that get caught and eaten by bigger, nastier creatures, and if the prey dies out then the bigger, nastier creatures will also die out.
At a guess (and this comes from a non-ecologist) I suspect that ‘plankton’ might be a ‘keystone species’—since these very small, floating organisms get eaten everything bigger than they are (and that’s almost everything, up to and including whales).
The qualifying word ‘keystone’ has been borrowed from stone masons who use this word for the central stone at the summit of an arch or vault which locks the whole structure together—hence, the ‘key’ stone.
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* My latest book is called Pray Like This. To look at prayer I do what I do in these Ozword columns: I go through the most famous prayer in the world (The Lord’s Prayer, also known as the Our Father) and unpack it word by word—each chapter being a short word-study on a key word in that prayer. There is a total of 21 words studies in all. To find out more, here’s a link to the publisher’s website (where you can buy a copy if you wish): Pray Like This – matthiasmedia.com.au
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BY THE WAY...
If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
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